Intel Core i7 Hackintosh Rig Specs + Benchmark

Matthew Musselwhite · December 22, 2015

So 2 weekends ago I got all the parts (+accessories) to build my new Workstation, The aim of this is system was to build a working Hackintosh. The system had to be capable to be able to perform well in SFM, Blender, GIMP and Adobe CC... I want to learn how to animate and rig in Maya, so it also had to be capable of running the program as well with the Renderman renderer.

So here are the specs for my rig:

Intel Core i7-4790k @ 4.0GHz
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 Memory (8GB, 1600MHz XMP)
Palit NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (3.5GB GDDR5, 3x MDP ports)
SanDisk Ultra II (480GB, Mac OS X Drive)
Seagate Hard Drive (500GB, Windows 10 Drive)
Gigabyte H97M-D3H
Corsair H100iGTX Cooler
EcoCool 650W PSU
Corsair Obsidian 350D

And here is the following the accessories I got for the new setup:

Apple Magic Keyboard
Apple Magic Mouse (Gen 1)
GMYLE USB Bluetooth Adapter (Broadcom Chip, BT 4.0 Standard)
LG 34UC87C Monitor (IPS, 21:9)

There are a few issues I have encountered with this build, The first being the CPU Overclock settings doesn't take effect in either the OS X or Win 10 sides (but I'm pinning that down on not having a OC-compatable MB), as well as the RAM only registering as 1333MHz on the OS X side. There are some issues in OS X since it's not a native Mac, but I won't bore you with those unnecessary details... Now without further a-due, I present to you the benchmarks for my new system:

As you can see, I'm getting roughly double the performance compared to my previous system (which was also Haswell-based), So I'm super chuffed with the results. I will upgrade the RAM to 32GB as well as getting a Quadro Card at some point in this machine's lifespan. But considering this was my first build ever, I consider this a huge success!

Thanks for checking out this post and have a Merry Christmas!